‘Darwinism’ is often associated with a quite narrowly defined scientific picture. Central to this are the view of evolution as change in the frequency of genes; evolution as overwhelmingly driven by competitive natural selection; and the assumption that living things can be arranged on a branching tree the branches of which are genetically isolated from one another. I believe that this picture has largely outlived its usefulness, and that evolutionary theory is in the midst of a period of radical rethinking that is shifting the boundaries of how we understand evolution. In this lecture I shall focus on the growing realisation of the importance of cooperation in evolution, an idea that has often been sidelined by an excessive emphasis on competition. Mutualism and symbiosis, lateral exchange of genes and endosymbiosis, in which one biological entity is integrated into another, and the evolution of many forms of sociality, are among the phenomena that can be included under the concept of cooperation, and which have played a fundamental role in evolution. Two conclusions follow from the rapid changes that evolutionary ideas are currently undergoing. First, I suggest that we should adopt a much more open-ended conception of Darwinism. It is hardly a compliment to one of our greatest scientists that we should tie his name to a frozen and dogmatic conception of a scientific theory that we are rapidly leaving behind. Moreover, though unsurprisingly there are many scientific advances that Darwin could not have foreseen, today’s topic, cooperation, is one in which he took a major interest, but which has largely remained a mystery to a narrow view of Darwinism. However, I assume that Darwin would have been delighted that evolutionary science had progressed far beyond his first foundational conclusion. Second, and turning to a different sort of boundary, Darwinism in the narrow sense is widely advertised as providing us insights into human nature and even, consequently, the way we should live. I think particularly of the school of so-called Evolutionary Psychology. Basing our self-conception on increasingly obsolete understandings of science is clearly a bad idea and illustrates where we should draw firm boundaries to Darwinism in the narrow sense even as we expand them in the sense above. However as a young but developing science, and if understood in a properly cautious way, Darwinism may indeed be expected gradually to provide us clearer insight into what it is to be a product of the evolutionary process and, more specifically, what it is to be human.

Many people – Darwin included – have claimed that the human species will continue to evolve in the future, as it has in the past. That notion gave impetus to the eugenics movement, and to much of modern science fiction. I will argue that, given what we know about the Darwinian processes of natural selection and random change in our own species, that adaptive evolution is – for the time being, and at least in the developed world – more or less over.

Understanding how the evolutionary processes expounded by Darwin and Wallace have shaped current patterns of biodiversity is a profound challenge to modern Evolutionary Biogeography. We live in a time of accelerating global change due to human impacts on the biosphere, leading many to refer to an anthropogenic extinction crisis. Yet our knowledge of the distribution of biodiversity remains woefully incomplete. This limits the effectiveness of conservation efforts, especially those within recognized global hotspots. Here then, is the challenge to the new generation of evolutionary biogeographers – to be able to predict the current distribution of diversity, at multiple scales, by harnessing our knowledge of evolutionary processes and past environmental change. From this point, we can forecast better the inevitable impacts future global change and identify strategies that will protect both the products of past evolution and the processes that ensure ongoing viability of natural systems. In this talk, I will describe how key biogeographic insights of Darwin and Wallace have been supported and extended by modern (especially molecular) biogeography, with particular reference to island radiations and tropical rainforests. Drawing on this, I will outline a predictive approach to biogeographic analysis. Though incomplete, such a framework should enhance both the fundamental science and the effectiveness of conservation in a rapidly changing world.

Charles Darwin’s work had a profound influence on the study of human society, though in a much slower and more unreliable way than on non-human biology. His most important ideas about human society were not the ones that had the earliest and most visible impact. Rather than retell the familiar story of how ideas about heredity and the centrality of the competitive struggle came to dominate social science in the late 19th century, to be equally vigorously and uncritically repudiated in the 20th, this lecture will focus on a different lesson from Darwin. Our cousinship to other primates, and especially to great apes, has yielded real insights into the organization of human societies. We share many features with other primates, and we differ from them also in important ways besides the obvious ones. As well as summarizing what we can learn about human society from modern primate research, I shall ask how much of this would have surprised Darwin himself. The answer, which draws more on Darwin’s later books The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals than on The Origin of Species, is itself quite surprising. Darwin emerges as a man both astonishingly prescient and at times curiously in thrall to the preconceptions of his time.

Within months of Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species, novelists, poets and artists began to turn Darwin’s ideas into art. That they have continued to do so up to the present day is a testimony to the imaginative reach of Darwin’s ideas as well as to the extent to which they transformed ways of seeing. Darwinism can be seen running through some of the late nineteenth century’s most richly imaginative prose and poetry including Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr Moreau and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But where nineteenth-century writers may have seen hybrid monsters, degeneration and extinction, Darwinism has come to have new meanings for each subsequent generation of writers and artists. Novelist and academic Rebecca Stott will show this perpetual re-making and ‘making new’ of Darwin’s ideas by taking a literary journey through late nineteenth-century fiction, to the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Ted Hughes and Ruth Padel and to the contemporary novels of Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt to show that writers have not just re-used Darwin’s ideas but have translated, adapted and extended them in fascinating ways.

Darwin, with his grizzled beard and deep sad eyes, appears today as a ubiquitous icon, his image appearing on posters, book jackets, banknotes, and postage stamps from around the world. The debates about his ideas are international, and have been almost from the first publication of his main evolutionary books. How did this come to be the case? To answer this we can begin by stepping back from the immediate impact of the Origin of Species and Descent of Man, to view these books in the context of long-standing controversies about evolution and materialism from the eighteenth century onwards. Darwin’s work is important in this broader story for three reasons. First, with the reception of Darwin’s books the topic of evolution, which had long sparked conversation in the literary salons of the Atlantic world, became much more closely tied with newly emerging forms of scientific research in laboratories, universities and museums. Second, Darwin’s own vision of nature, like that of his great predecessors Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Lyell, was global from the start. During the Beagle voyage and later through a vast correspondence network, Darwin attempted to encompass the entire natural world (including humans) in his works. His approach resulted in unusually open texts, with ambiguities and opportunities for interpretation that made them natural fault-lines for public discussion across a diverse cultural range. And finally, Darwin’s life coincided with an unprecedented expansion in international communication. Particularly significant were the new, rapid-publication intellectual weeklies and monthlies in urban centres from Buenos Aires to Cairo and from Melbourne to Beijing. Evolutionary controversy, so familiar on the Internet and television today, emerged in these new media of the first great age of global communication. In these forums, debates about “Darwinism”, as it soon was called, became central to grappling at a local level with economic modernisation, scientific racism, and economic imperialism. What was the relation between science and traditional religion? Was it possible to harvest the economic fruits of modern knowledge, without adopting its conclusions about the origins of the human mind and a hierarchy of human races?

By the time of his death Charles Darwin was one of the most celebrated--and one of the most notorious--scientists in the world. Still controversial, Darwin has become an icon of modern science at the same time as his theories have become the basis of modern biology. In this series exploring Darwin's legacy, Janet Browne looks at Darwin's education and intellectual growth with special reference to the Beagle voyage and beyond. Over the years, however, our opinions about key moments in the development of Darwin's ideas have subtly shifted. She will consider the ways in which historians and biographers since Darwin's death have written about the development of his theories, and set these views in the context of changing ideas about biography in the twentieth century.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is still the mechanism we use to explain organismal adaptation, but the intervening 150 years since the publication of the Origin have led to many new discoveries that help us to document the precise basis of those adaptations – to see the steps of evolution. Chief among these is the sequence of an organism’s DNA , which contains a detailed record of its evolutionary history – a record of how the fittest are made. Dr. Carroll will explain how the adaptations of some amazing animals to various environments – the freezing waters of the Antarctic, lava flows, or the colorful jungle, are reflected in the DNA record of some marvelous creatures.